The Richter Archive at 75

Richter sat for this portrait prior to an exhibition on Giorgione at Johns Hopkins University, where he was the keynote speaker for a lecture series.

This cabinet card size photo was taken of Richter upon completion of his doctoral degree in 1907 at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.

This painting, now considered to be by Titian, once hung in Albury Park, Surrey, home of the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland.

This painting, now considered to be by Titian, once hung in Albury Park, Surrey, home of the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland. Richter went to see the painting and took his daughter Gigi with him. She had previously been sent to Berlin to study drawing. She produced a handful of sketches that are part of the Richter Archive, along with George’s more crudely drawn sketches of various works of art.

Richter devised his own system for keeping order amongst his growing photo archive, arranging them first by school, then by artist and theme.

Some material from the Richter Archive devoted to costume history remains in the original boxes and folders. The contents of this box depict costumes from 1821 to the mid-20th century, including J. A.D. Ingres’s portrait Madame Moitessier in the Samuel H. Kress Collection of the National Gallery of Art.

This photo dates from the time that the painting was still in the Allendale collection and before it was acquired by Samuel H. Kress in 1938.

This is Richter’s annotated and corrected copy that was presented to Michael Straight by Gigi Richter Crompton, his cousin-in-law. The book is “Grangerized”—that is, blank sheets were bound into the copy for annotations.

Rebay, cousin to Mrs. Richter, was crucial in bringing the archive to the Gallery.

This assembled pair of daguerreotypes shows works of art depicting George and Martha Washington. James Sharples executed the pastel of President Washington in 1796 or 1797. George Washington Parke Custis, the president’s step-grandson, recalled that the artist had used a mechanical instrument, a physiognotrace, to ensure the accuracy of his subject’s profile. The miniature of Martha by Walter Robinson was painted on ivory and dates to 1794. It descended in ownership to the Custis-Lee family and is presumed to have been lost during the Civil War, when a barge containing the contents of the family’s Arlington House capsized on the Potomac.

Stereographs, an early form of 3-D photography, provided depth to the depicted scene when the image was seen through a special viewer. Mass-produced images of landscapes, artworks, or architecture, like the Cole residence in Indiana, were popular in the 19th century and commonly found in even modest homes as a source of entertainment.

John Rewald, author of the catalogue raisonné of Paul Cézanne’s work, travelled with his friend Leo Marchutz around France in 1932 and 1933 to document the landscape motifs employed by Cézanne in his painting, as he feared that time would ruin the views that Cézanne depicted. In this photograph Marchutz shows a view of Mont Sainte Victoire, which Cézanne painted several times over the course of his career.

John Rewald, author of the catalogue raisonné of Paul Cézanne’s work, travelled with his friend Leo Marchutz around France in 1932 and 1933 to document the landscape motifs employed by Cézanne in his painting, as he feared that time would ruin the views that Cézanne depicted. The pair also documented Cézanne’s studio, where Rewald recreated vignettes using the props left in the studio after the artist’s death.

Art historian Richard Offner assembled a remarkable photographic archive of Florentine Renaissance paintings that he deposited at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. When the Institute could no longer house them, they were donated to the Gallery, where they are an invaluable tool to researchers of Italian painting. This example of a panel painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was photographed in 1930.

Art historian Richard Offner assembled a remarkable photographic archive of Florentine Renaissance paintings that he deposited at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. When the Institute could no longer house them, they were donated to the Gallery, where they are an invaluable tool to researchers of Italian painting. This example of a panel painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was photographed in 1930.

The Library has an unusually large collection of prints by this Spanish photographer and his firm—the subject of a library exhibition in 2011. This view of the new Bullring in Madrid was taken just after construction was completed and shows Laurent’s eye for composition.

The Gallery acquired the archive of the important 19th-century British photographer Francis Bedford in 2016. It contains approximately 4,400 photographs and two index volumes that survey British and Welsh architecture and landscape.

Many of the photographs by Kennedy, an art historian and photographer, have been in the Library’s collection for years as part of the library of Gallery founder Joseph Widener. The original group has been augmented by additional gifts and purchases of Kennedy’s work. Kennedy became interested in creating photographs as a means of expressing “in the most sympathetic way, the character of the forms as the sculptor left them, complete and valid in their own right.” He began photographing sculpture in the 1920s and was close friends with photographer Ansel Adams.

Brumfield, a professor of Slavic languages at Tulane University, began documenting Russian architecture in the 1970s and has published extensively in this area. His many photographic campaigns preserve in film the many structures that have now been lost and provide extensive documentation of well-known structures, like Rastrelli’s Saint Andrew in Kiev.

This photo of Eugene Delacroix by Victor Laisné, who experimented briefly with the new medium of photography in the mid-19th century, was the model for the stipple engraving of Delacroix's visage used in Histoire des artistes vivants français et étrangers: études d'après nature by Theophile Silvestre. Photos by Laisné are very scarce.

Theophile Silvestre published his Histoire des artistes vivants français et étrangers: études d'après nature in various editions from 1853 on. He had the painter Victor Laisné, who was experimenting with photography, produce portraits of artists in this new medium that were used as the models for the engravings in his book.

In 2014 the family of the artist William A. Smith donated his collection of artists’ portraits, some created as part of a UNESCO cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. He continued his study of artists, many of whom became his friends, both at home and in his travels in Asia. This unusual enlarged contact sheet, with frames marked in wax pencil, shows his neighbor Andrew Wyeth.

Artist Paul Katz had a day job as photographer for the Solomon Guggenheim Museum. He would visit his friends in their studios and snap pictures of them at work, like this view of Jasper Johns working on Periscope (Hart Crane) (1962).

After the death of Édouard Manet in 1883, his friends arranged a memorial exhibition of his work at the École des Beaux-Arts in February 1884 that was photographed by Jules-Michel Godet. The paintings, hung in tiers against a draped background, are now in museum collections around the world. In this example, two paintings now in the Gallery’s collection can be seen coincidentally hanging side by side: Plum Brandy and The Melon. Until The Melon was donated to the Gallery by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon following Mrs. Mellon’s death in 2014 and the work was spotted in this photograph, it was not known to have been included in this exhibition.

The department of image collections has built extensive holdings of photographic material documenting world’s fairs, dating from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 to Montreal’s Expo ‘67. These expositions often had elaborate parks filled with temporary structures showcasing the latest technological innovations or exhibitions of art that attracted visitors from across the globe. The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, officially the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, filled what was then the suburban Forest Park with halls for the exhibiting countries that surrounded a vast lagoon. 

The department of image collections has built extensive holdings of photographic material documenting world’s fairs, dating from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 to Montreal’s Expo ‘67. These expositions often had elaborate parks filled with temporary structures showcasing the latest technological innovations or exhibitions of art that attracted visitors from across the globe.

The department of image collections has built extensive holdings of photographic material documenting world’s fairs, dating from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 to Montreal’s Expo ‘67. These expositions often had elaborate parks filled with temporary structures showcasing the latest technological innovations or exhibitions of art that attracted visitors from across the globe. The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

Fenton, known for his fine art photography and his eloquent images of the Crimean War, was also a photographer for the British Museum from 1854 to 1859. In his specially designed rooftop studio he photographed a wide variety of museum objects, including works on paper like this 1660 drawing by Claude Lorrain. The prints of Fenton’s photograph were produced in large quantities and retailed by the London print dealer P. & D. Colnaghi & Co.

While the vast majority of the Gallery’s image collections comprise photographic material, the department also has a small but impressive collection of reproductive prints. Reproductive prints first appear in the 16th century as a way to document princely art collections and those of other noble families and to disseminate knowledge of art to a wider audience. A significant set of calcographic prints—prints made from the original plates but in the early 20th century—were transferred from the Library of Congress to the Gallery in 1986.

While the vast majority of the Gallery’s image collections comprise photographic material, the department also has a small but impressive collection of reproductive prints. Reproductive prints first appear in the 16th century as a way to document princely art collections and those of other noble families and to disseminate knowledge of art to a wider audience. In 2005 Peter and Evelyn Kraus donated their collection of almost 500 primarily Dutch portrait prints to the department. The Kraus Collection contains etchings, engravings, and mezzotints, and in some cases multiple copies and states of the same sitter. This collection has been fully cataloged and digitized.